Gimme Some of That Thar CRM Stuff (Part 1 in a Series)

[Slight Change: New blog posts will now be published twice weekly, generally on Tuesdays and Thursdays.]

CRM. It means many different things to many different people. What is it, why is that important to me, and what would I use it for?

Since CRM today is much like, say accounting software or spreadsheets were to the 1980s and 90s, we thought we’d explore why Customer Relationship Management is becoming the backbone of so many companies today. To stretch the anatomical metaphor: if accounting was the lifeblood, CRM is becoming the spine, the nerve structure from which so much else flows.

CRM is a catch-all phrase for software that tracks interactions. Lots of types, and lots of interactions. In our experience, clients use it in about as many ways as there are clients, including the tracking of all interactions with their customers… tracking the progress and success of a new marketing campaign… using it in call-center or support tracking activities… tracking new prospects through the pipeline for sales forecasting and reporting… creating email campaigns… creating mail-merges… tracking warranty claims… generating service tickets or tracking service contracts… managing a knowledge base… the list goes on an on.

In our firm, we use it more than anything to track customer interactions over an extended period of time, probably upwards of ten years now. With our internal CRM, anyone in the company can see the latest interactions with any client at any time. Emails, proposals, call summaries, questions, issues, problems – all are logged and tracked within each client or prospect’s history, along with contact names and all the particulars.

That’s particularly useful in tracking the progress of, say, a project proposal, when you want to see the back-and-forths that have occurred over several months (or years), and who said what to whom.

Likewise, it’s useful for marketing purposes. We specialize in manufacturing and distribution, so we can segment by customer type, size, geography, etc., and target a mail or email campaign. When we want to reach out to our prospect and client base (we can of course distinguish between the two and segment accordingly), we can do so effectively in minutes.

Interestingly, no two clients seem to use CRM the same way, though there are some common threads, like tracking customer interactions generally, or segmenting a base for marketing purposes. The companies who embrace CRM do it almost without a second thought. It’s part of the DNA of the culture. How else could we run our business, they seem to say, if we don’t have a deep understanding of our clients and our interactions with them?

But there’s a catch: it’s hard, at least in the beginning. It’s not a software thing, not a tech thing – it’s a cultural thing. It has to start at the top, with the CEO, who above all should understand the gold that lies in a well managed customer relationship. It has to come from the top down, not from the bottom up, or it’s doomed to fail.